New York ? For decades, Rolling Stone and then Vanity Fair have offered amazing pictures of the famed and fabulous – Annie Leibovitz’s photographic map of the stars.

Ever wonder what was on the other side of the lens?

This is your chance to find out. The painstaking preparations. The makeup artists and stylists. The tall, bespectacled photographer, clicking away, wooing her subjects with patter: “Beautiful” … “Fantastic” … “Thank you very much.”

It’s all there to see in the PBS “American Masters” presentation, “Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens,” airing at 8 p.m. CDT, Wednesday.

All that, and more. And less, too.

More, in that the 90-minute documentary offers many, many celebrities who are happy to heap accolades on Leibovitz. There’s Whoopi Goldberg and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mick Jagger and Mikhail Baryshnikov and some extra-special surprise celebrities.

Like Hillary Rodham Clinton: Leibovitz “has really been a major chronicler of our country, what we care about, what we think about,” says the former first lady, current senator and probable future candidate for president.

More, in that it follows Leibovitz’s life, from a peripatetic childhood (her father was an Air Force officer, so the family moved a lot) to her blossoming interest in photography, to her work with magazines (there’s a detour into a drug problem), to renown, and finally to motherhood and the death of her lover, intellectual Susan Sontag, and of her father.

It’s all there in photographs. She draws no distinction between the pictures she is paid to take and those she takes of her loved ones. It’s all her work, she says.

We are treated to vintage films of Leibovitz in action in the 1960s and ’70s, and of the Rolling Stone staff in its San Francisco offices, long ago. (We get a lot of the young editor Jann Wenner, and even more of the middle-aged Wenner – too much of a not-so-good thing.)

This promotional photo, provided by PBS, shows photographer Annie Leibovitz, center, at Cafe de Flore, Paris, in 1997. Liebovitz is the subject of the documentary Annie

We get less, in that the documentary – written and directed by her sister Barbara, and coinciding with a book and museum show on Annie Leibovitz’s work – does a fitful job of explaining what it all means.

For all the words and images, there is little here that explains why she feels the need to photograph, and the origins of her talent.

Yes, her mom took a lot of pictures of the family; yes, Leibovitz recalls being enthralled by the immediacy of photography. It’s not enough.

And, yes, we see plenty of globe-trotting, and photo shoots featuring George Clooney and Kirsten Dunst. Leibovitz is driven and exacting, and she works hard. She’s immensely talented.

The question is: Is it art? Not surprisingly, for the most part, the answer is “yes.”

There is, though, a designated scold: Vicki Goldberg, photo critic for The New York Times.

She does not think Leibovitz’s high-concept photos – Bette Midler in a bed of roses when she starred in “The Rose”; the Blues Brothers with their faces painted blue – are all that insightful. They’re not narratives, she says; they’re jokes.

(Of course, this does not discredit them as magazine covers. They have great impact, the kind that would obviously inspire impulse buys on the newsstand.)

More broadly, Goldberg has little use for the celebrity culture that Leibovitz documents, lionizes and propagates with her photography.

“She is the apex of the image culture that is so fixated on celebrity, and she has catered to that. She has done it beautifully. But it’s a shabby culture in the end,” Goldberg says.

In fact, for all the suggestions that Leibovitz’s subjects can trace a direct line to the Medicis and others captured on canvas by great artists of the past, there is a crucial difference:

Those celebrities commissioned their own portraits, for their own pleasure and for posterity. Leibovitz’s pictures of folks like Tom Cruise and Demi Moore are commissioned by magazines, for the pleasure of readers. So, by proxy, they’re commissioned by us.

There is a lot to say about Annie Leibovitz and the cult of celebrity; perhaps it is unfair to fault this documentary for saying so little.

It is, after all, a video personality profile, and if nothing else it does offer a look at a glamorous world, and the nostalgia of all those striking photographs: Remember the one with Whoopi Goldberg immersed in a tub of milk? The one with Christo all wrapped in paper?

And then there is her most famous photograph – John Lennon, naked and curled up next to a fully clothed Yoko Ono. Leibovitz took it for Rolling Stone just hours before Lennon’s murder; the American Society of Magazine Editors named it the top magazine cover of the past 40 years.

Second was a Vanity Fair cover of a very pregnant and very naked Demi Moore. The photographer was … well, you can guess.